PingCap TiDB Leaks

(fulcrumsec.vg)

254 points | by swyx a day ago ago

36 comments

  • llama052 3 hours ago ago

    https://www.pingcap.com/trust-hub/security/security-update-o...

    I find it really baffling how much they are downplaying this incident on their statement.

    ”An external incident response firm reviewed PingCAP’s production systems and found no evidence that the attacker ran commands or maintained persistent access in the systems reviewed”

    That does not appear to be true.

    • bombcar 3 hours ago ago

      Certainly there was no evidence; they likely have no logging anyway!

      • zergrush 2 hours ago ago

        since they pasted customer creds in jira tickets they most likely are very liable hence the downplaying

        im not an expert but if I was an investor I'd try to find a buyer for my shares and run

    • alright2565 44 minutes ago ago

      > in the systems reviewed

      is load bearing I expect.

  • aliasxneo 3 hours ago ago

    > PingCAP's engineers paste customers' production credentials into Jira tickets.

    Holy hell, I've heard of this happening, but I've never personally seen it in my 10 years as an SRE. That's absolutely wild.

    • adamparsons 3 hours ago ago

      It sounds like their jira instance was truly the keys to the kingdom, given the creds _and_ tickets describing all the flaws needing fixing. A golden README.MD to escalate to their hearts content

  • xKingfisher a day ago ago

    Coming this close on the heels of the security audit by NCC [1] is pretty embarassing for all parties.

    [1]https://www.pingcap.com/press-release/tidb-ncc-group-securit...

    • hintymad 10 hours ago ago

      > TiDB, the open-source distributed SQL database powered by PingCAP, today published the results of a rigorous source-code security assessment by NCC Group, one of the world’s leading cybersecurity consultancies.

      It looks like you can assess the hell out of your source code, but your system can still leak if you don't secure your operations.

      • somat an hour ago ago

        There was a quote from back in early web days that has stuck with me, Still relevant today.

        "good opsec will save you from bad crypto. but the converse is not true, good crypto will not save you from bad opsec"

    • kobieps 12 hours ago ago

      From personal experience having worked with multiple "enterprise-grade" pentest vendors (including NCC), I think the entire pentest industry is overdue for a big shake-up.

    • jacquesm 4 hours ago ago

      No particular opinion on NCC but a lot of that stuff is pay-to-play.

  • dherls a day ago ago

    If true, this is next level incompetence from PingCap. Apparently the attackers set up a replication pipeline for a month?!

    > We even stood up a replication feed of their own control-plane database using credentials committed in their own repositories — GCP service-account keys and an Azure service principal — and let their infrastructure deliver it to us. Every six hours, for the last twenty-two days of the campaign, from 8 September to 30 September, that pipeline faithfully re-exported every table of the operational heart of TiDB Cloud — tenants, users, API keys, cluster credentials, changefeeds, migrations — and pushed it out.

  • arpinum a day ago ago

    AWS private rates gives PingCAP ~47% off list price. Wonder which services got the biggest discounts? Unsurprisingly for a db company the cross-az traffic is 15% of their bill.

    • driverdan an hour ago ago

      Sounds about right. The more you use the deeper the discount they'll give you.

    • perpetualpear 2 hours ago ago

      You can get some sweet deals on s3, assuming you store 10-100s of PB

  • neya 2 hours ago ago

    Pingcap's statement:

        With support from outside counsel and third-party forensic specialists, there is no evidence that data stored in TiDB was impacted. We keep on investigating and will provide updates on any new findings.
    
    
    They have the fucking data in a tarball and Pingcap claims no data was impacted. This sounds like the bad blood story part 2 all over again.
  • nemothekid a day ago ago

    Man I recently executed a migration from Aurora to Planetscale. I seriously considered PingCap but decided against it because I thought they cloud pricing was too complex. I wonder if my personal information is in the leak.

  • wannabe44 a day ago ago

    > Summary: "The root password of the cluster can be reset unconditionally"

    But what matters is that it was all memory safe and had no data races.

    • boorbat 15 hours ago ago

      You realize it's written in Go right?

      • wannabe44 14 hours ago ago

        Not even data race safe then. NGMI.

  • thenthenthen 3 hours ago ago

    Why is Baidu among their clients

  • dangoodmanUT a day ago ago

    what is happening today

    and how are people not talking about this more

    • dilyevsky a day ago ago

      only the beginning. next year or two are going to be wild on this front so buckle up...

  • esafak a day ago ago
  • rvz a day ago ago

    First the Google Cloud outage [0], then the CA private key leak [1]...

    ...and now this...

    > Today we are making the PingCAP breach public. We possess the complete TiDB Cloud control plane, its billing and finance estate, its GCP storage estate and its AWS cost and billing estate, its Jira, its CRM, its analytics, its source code, and a four-year log of every connection every customer ever made to its product, from the IP addresses of their application servers.

    This is an entire leak of ALL PingCap TiDB's customers AND data.

    All of this in a single day. It is over.

    [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50163961

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50166579

    • gregwebs a day ago ago

      I am reading this as a leak of every possible piece of metadata but not an actual leak of customer data. They have SQL logs which do contain customer data and there is a mention of some snapshots/imports.

      • berenddeboer 7 hours ago ago

        they leaked full connection strings for customer databases with users and passwords.

      • hdjdnxjzhzhs a day ago ago

        How the fuck is 10.6TB metadata?

        • gregwebs a day ago ago

          TiDB is for large scale data. You generally wouldn't use it unless you have at least 1TB of data. 10TB is a single small customer database for them.

        • fock 12 hours ago ago

          (POV when storing 1PB in Oracle) when I saw the 10 TB in another post, I was like "wait, isn't this sold to scale out, we have 100 times the data here".

        • binsquare a day ago ago

          Easily at scale

          Size is not a good indicator for content quality

    • qingcharles a day ago ago

      Don't forget the PHP megabomb dropping in a few hours too.

  • jedisct1 18 hours ago ago

    It's written in Rust, so it's safe.